Reflections on DOOM's Development - <AUTHOR> https://rome.ro/news/2018/12/10/reflections-on-dooms-development <comment><USER2> A nice 25-year retrospective from one of the original FPS title DOOM's team.

> The inclusion of multiplayer co-op and deathmatch modes changed everything > about games. We knew that playing a game as fast and over-the-top as DOOM > would signal a new era. I visualized what E1M7 would look like with two > players shooting rockets at each other over a large room and it got me more > excited than I had been since Wolfenstein 3D's chaingun audio.

It wasn't as if multi player games did not exist before; however, they fairly exclusively were single screen affairs.

Being first person and having your own screen on your own machine was truly revolutionary.

I fondly remember fragging my family members and learning about IPX (it wasn't always TCP everywhere).

<comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIDI_Maze)

There was one earlier example of deathmatch as we know it, and I played it... after a fashion.

> MIDI Maze is a networked first-person shooter for the Atari ST developed by > Xanth Software F/X and released in 1987 by Hybrid Arts. The game takes place > in a maze of untextured walls. The world animates smoothly as the player > turns, much like the earlier Wayout, instead of only permitting 90 degree > changes of direction. It has been suggested that MIDI Maze introduced the > concept of deathmatch combat.[1]

[snip]

> Up to 16 computers can be networked in a "MIDI Ring" by connecting one > computer's MIDI-OUT port to the next computer's MIDI-IN port.

Hence the name. What a weird and wonderful hack.

On a personal note, I played a port of this... to the original Game Boy:

> A Game Boy version was developed by the original developers, Xanth Software > F/X, and published in 1991 by Bulletproof Software (now Blue Planet > Software), under the title Faceball 2000.[5] James Yee, owner of Xanth, had > a vision to port the 520ST application to the Game Boy. George Miller was > hired to re-write the AI-based drone logic, giving each drone a unique > personality trait.[citation needed] It is notable for being the only Game > Boy game to support 16 simultaneous players. It did so by connecting > multiple copies of the Four Player Adapter to one another so that each > additional adapter added another two players up to the maximum - seven such > adapters were needed for a full 16 player experience.[citation needed]

Game Boy deathmatch. Never got to experience it myself, as my family only had the one Game Boy and we didn't know anyone else who had the game.

<comment><USER4> Hi, Xanth programmer from the 8/16-bit era here. Can confirm the MIDI Maze FPS ancestry and MIDI-based deathmatch "LAN parties" (that predated LANs).

Can also confirm that we were (and are) in awe and big fans of ID, Romero, Carmack, etc. (We prototyped but never released a PC FPS.)

Playing an FPS deathmatch head-to-head on Game Boys was as giddy and intense as you'd expect in 1992-3. Literally, it _was_ head-to-head ... those cables weren't very long.

Before anyone runs off to buy an old cart or run an image on an emulator, set your expectations of FPS framerates realistically for a Z80 (or 65816) console in the early 1990s. CPUs were slow for matrix (or any) math, memory access was slow, buses were narrow, "graphics hardware" was optimal for side scrollers and tile-mapped character graphics with a few sprites. All of this worked against quickly rendering frames of 3D. We certainly couldn't use any textbook 3D graphics algorithms. It was all trickery and shortcuts but it worked. (The SNES was a bit better though we predated the FX chip which I think would have helped more.) The Game Boy version was amazing for its portability. I personally enjoyed our SNES version the most but it was back to single-screen two-player. Both were written single-handedly by a genius engineer named Robert Champagne who later went on to be Chief of Technology at Nintendo Software.

<comment><USER3> I'm utterly amazed by the fact I can communicate with one of the authors of one of the games that defined my childhood.

Faceball 2000 is, to me, a hidden gem of the Game Boy, a platform with many well-known gems already, and it helped me pass many pleasurable hours.

(Seriously. The Game Boy had amazing battery life, as long as you were playing it in a well-lit environment.)

Even playing it alone was fun, and I still remember the music as some of the best of that era of console gaming.

(And, yes, I sank many hours into DOOM and DOOM II as well.)

<comment><USER4> That's awesome. It makes me happy that you enjoyed and remember the game. Robert Champagne, the real genius, coded the Game Boy and I rode his coattails. I was responsible for the Game Gear version, a PC prototype, and other things. My code ran a _lot_ slower than Rob's and I was never happy with the final frame rate. :-( The GG had a nice colour screen but horrible battery life and poor market share compared to the GB. [Aside: the Atari Lynx was a slightly earlier platform and technically interesting but its market share was zilch.]

We were pretty proud of Faceball 2000. James Yee, the non-technical founder behind MIDI Maze and Faceball 2000, was a visionary guy. Keeping the aesthetic abstract (smiley faces, minimal texturing or "realism", etc.) was way easier to code but it also won us some parental advisory awards in the industry because we avoided gratuitous violence. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm glad you remember the music. The GB and GG music were composed by David Whittaker. Very talented. When you unavoidably listen to your game's music over and over and over and over, it's nice when it's actually well composed and sonically interesting. The SNES music is also great, composed by George Sanger, and the SNES had better audio hardware by a long shot but I actually prefer the tunes and instrumentation of the GB/GG intros, outros, level music, etc.

Nice chat. And as the game says, when you get whacked by a smiley face, "HAVE A NICE DAY."

<comment><USER5> David Whittaker was my favorite back in the day. Sometimes I fired up "Feud" simply to listen to the music. It was funny to hear his "Lazy Jones" track later in the clubs, albeit covered by Zombie Nation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _and for the first time we were putting multiplayer into our game with a > mode I called Deathmatch because that name just made sense._

I never really thought about this. Deathmatch is just what generic multiplayer without teams or goals is called, and has always been called. Someone had to come up with the name Deathmatch. I was around for DOOM's release, and this term has always just felt ubiquitous. Cool!

<comment><USER7> [https://books.google.com/books?id=ziG6BwAAQBAJ&pg=PT386&dq=d...](https://books.google.com/books?id=ziG6BwAAQBAJ&pg=PT386&dq=deathmatch&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjImtmrtpbfAhWmslQKHRs3DEsQ6AEILzAB#v=onepage&q=deathmatch&f=false) (1992)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> >> It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn't challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for the stars.

They did it again with Quake, but then it was the end of a small team being able to beat the AAA development houses. I was in awe that it was created by a few guys, no huge budgets or huge team.

<comment><USER9> Quake was again a technological tour-de-force, and its moddability and multiplayer opened up a whole new world of gaming, but as a single-player game I find it strictly inferior to the original DOOM.

<comment><USER10> I do not agree. At all.

Quake has some of the most amazing maps/episodes and utterly terrifying aesthetic of any FPS, despite how disparate levels were at times.

I can think of few older FPS that hold up as well as Quake 1's single player campaign to this day, and the mapping community is still running amazingly too.

Quake certainly took its toll on ID, and was when Romero was ousted. It may not have been the original game they planned, but I don't think the game turned out any bit less amazing of a campaign than OG Doom IMO.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This game _defined_ FPS games. This, and Marathon (remember that? RIP Bungie.)

I remember trading DOOM WADs on SyQuest drives.

<comment><USER12> > This game defined FPS games.

Kind of literally. Before the term FPS they were called "DOOM clones".

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> DOOM was before my time, but I really enjoyed Masters of Doom which is the story of id up to right before DOOM III. Wil Wheaton did a fantastic job with the audiobook.

<comment><USER14> DOOM was one of the first 3D games I played and the first I played with a Soundblaster (a GPU like card you'd buy to hear sounds other than beeps and boops). I've never been so amazed at a game since. I literally had my jaw open for minutes. After fiddling with a set of drivers that allow me to have enough RAM to boot it of course. I was just learning how to draw pixels on screen with BASIC and could somehow extrapolate that if I get good enough I could maybe do a game that resembles a 2D game but when I saw DOOM I realized how little I know. There's no way I could to this day write a 3D engine which makes me a bit sad but at least I understand most of the math behind it after working in games.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The year of 1993 was a magical one ... The engine was revolutionary in that it represented a type of world that no one had seen on a computer screen before. Angled walls and halls that darken in the distance."

(obligatory old-man-shouts-at-cloud post) pfft, nobody who hadn't already played Ultima Underworld II, released in Jan 1993, maybe

but seriously, great game (both of them!), and always interesting to read about

<comment><USER16> Well, Wolfenstein 3D and even Catacomb 3D were both before Doom as well.

<comment><USER17> Neither of those were true 3D. In fact, even Doom wasn't fully 3D.

The view could only ever be at 90 degrees for example (no looking up or down) and the environments couldn't have more than one floor and one ceiling at any given location.

I think the limitations made the genre even more successful because it forced people to "evolve" into 3D by going from Wolf3D > Doom > Quake. Step by step. True _immersive_ 3D was actually a jarring (but undoubtedly fun) experience for the first time. Anyone here remember Descent?

<comment><USER18> By Heretic, you could look up or down in Doom engine, although the way that was done distorted perspective (it basically kept all vertical lines vertical, while distorting proportions horizontally, to approximate the effect).

I would also add Duke Nukem 3D to your step-by-step list. Reason being, firstly, it had sloped floors. But also, as I recall, it was the first 3D action game to have what was then called "room over room", even though the engine was fundamentally limited in the same manner as Doom - it achieved that by utilizing portals. So actual architecture was still one-level, but portals transparently connected it in a way that simulated multiple levels.

There were also some really crazy hacks to achieve something like that in Doom. Like, bridges that you could walk over _or_ under. The way it was done is by having an invisible platform that was lowered and raised as the player approached the "bridge" from the corresponding direction, combined with a fake middle texture that wasn't actually solid.

<comment><USER17> All this talk of Id games and I totally forgot about Duke! It definitely should be in the discussion. Now, if they'd only make a sequel... ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Doom is such a foundational game. My friend and I both got into tech by making doom wads and playing them over our modems in the mid 90s. Fond memories. I still remember some of the maps I made, they were a blast. Hilarious too since we would mod various sound effects to play funny things :-)

</comment><comment><USER20> Serious question, are Romero and Carmack still friends? I think they're both brilliant and a great example of a duo.

For some reason the internet paints them as rivals, or that Carmack was the one who succeeded (continuing with ID and now at FB) and Romero faded away and was never really technical (and works at a gas station).

<comment><USER21> I read the book Masters of Doom a few years ago and they did a good job portraying them as creative rivals with clashing personalities.

I don't know if they've reconciled in recent years and I've never heard about Romero working at a gas station. Any source for that?

[https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed- Cult...](https://www.amazon.com/Masters-Doom-Created-Transformed-Culture- ebook/dp/B000FBFNL0)

<comment><USER22> Literally the last thing Masters of Doom talks about is how Carmack and Romero are still friends. Maybe not best buddies - they have completely different personalities - but I don't think there's much animosity between them.

There's no basis for the claim he's working at a gas station. He runs a game development company in Ireland.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > I was finally using a real operating system with an incredible programming > language, Objective-C

I know that NeXT workstations were pivotal to id's work at the time, but I still love seeing some casual ObjC praise included.

</comment><comment><USER24> It is a little bit sad to realize that this amazing game that took so much effort and ingenuity can now be easily run at a full speed in an emulator of 8086 written in JavaScript. Inside the browser, on a Raspberry Pi.

<comment><USER25> A modified Doom codebase can run on a Gameboy Advance with an acceptable framerate.

Doom's rendering trick wasn't dependent on CPU power as much as it was cache manipulation, memory access speed, and VGA card speed. Everything was already pre-computed, so the rendering engine only needed to look up a binary tree and spit out to the screen exactly what it was told. Even the game logic reused some of the renderer's LUTs when the code could get away with it, which was a lot.

<comment><USER26> 320x200 is 64,000 pixels. Assuming 20 fps, that's 1,280,000 pixels per second that need to be rendered. It ran at least 20 fps on a 66 Mhz CPU, meaning that each pixel had at most 52 clock cycles to render, and that's not even handling game logic. Certainly some optimizations involving not re-rendering pixels on the HUD come into play, but still I'm blown away that that they figured out such crazy optimizations.

I feel like if I were to try to write Doom's engine that I would struggle to reach 60 fps on my i7 CPU, even rendering in Doom's original 320x200 resolution.

<comment><USER27> Actually I'm pretty sure it was 320 x 240 (mode X, which had the advantage of providing square pixels), so slightly more impressive.

<comment><USER28> It was 320x200, apparently: [https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio](https://doom.fandom.com/wiki/Aspect_ratio)

<comment><USER25> Not to be _that guy_ but the doom wiki moved over to its own domain at [https://doomwiki.org](https://doomwiki.org) due to Wikia hijacking the wiki.

Anyway, Doom used a special version of Mode X dubbed "Mode Y", which is Abrash's ModeX with fewer pixels to worry about.

<comment><USER28> The correction is very welcome. Fixed link: [https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio](https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio)

(I found the link with google on my iPad, so my search was not as exhaustive as it might have otherwise been.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> > I don't recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, > especially one like that.

Good to see Daikatana has proven instructive to Mr. Romero about the pitfalls of writing checks with your mouth that you can't cash with your ass.

</comment><comment><USER30> "I don't recommend writing a press release at the start of your project, especially one like that."

So even though Doom was wildly successful and (according to Romero) was the most ambitious game development effort before or since, he doesn't advocate that others follow that path?

It's likely that the team worked so hard and achieved such success at least in part to the fact that they had a very clear goal for what they wanted to achieve and that they had publicly announced this goal.

Interestingly, writing a Press Release is the very first step of the "Working Backwards" product development process at Amazon and it is mandatory part of introducing any new product.

<comment><USER31> That comment is likely a nod to his later experience pre-hyping his game Daikatana, which he got lots of backlash for.</comment></comment>


Show HN: A Mood Tracker on the Web - <AUTHOR> https://www.quidsentio.com/ <comment><USER2> While I think this is an amazing idea. However, I have one issue with it that has been echoed here in the comments. I'm way too paranoid for other people to have my data on this as it is quite personal.

Therefore, I have looked for a system for which data entry is relatively easy. I currently track my mood through a local [0] TiddlyWiki [1] combined with Noteself [2].

I have been doing it for a 6 weeks now and it seems to work fine and have learned a thing or two about myself that I otherwise wouldn't have.

[0] I store it locally and back it up.

[1] [https://tiddlywiki.com/](https://tiddlywiki.com/)

[2] [https://noteself.github.io/](https://noteself.github.io/)

<comment><USER3> As user/tech guy I'm sympathetic with being paranoid, but we know that paranoid and tech people is a really tiny subset of population. Advice: don't design for the paranoid, except is your target market

<comment><USER2> Which is why I am sharing my workflow with HN. I didn't build anything. TiddlyWiki exists for 10+ years and it is basically one HTML file.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My main concern with this is having this sensitive information just sitting there plaintext in some DB. I'd avoid putting personal stuff like this on the web at all.

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid concern. I thought a little bit about this, but the only solution would be an e2e encryption (where the same person is both ends actually). And in this situation, you risk losing all your data if you forget your password. There is a solution that you can think with no such trade-off?

<comment><USER5> Create a file format for the data and connect to the user's Google Drive or Dropbox.

<comment><USER6> That's an awesome idea for this kind of applications. Does anybody know a sample app using this feature?

<comment><USER7> [https://stackedit.io/](https://stackedit.io/)

Its open source too, I think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Nice work. There are a lot of benefits to daily mood tracking like this and I think you have an opportunity to go further in how you allow a user to track their feelings beyond 'good' or 'bad.' Yale's Center for Emotional Intelligence is a great resource for this kind of stuff - [http://ei.yale.edu/mood-meter-app/](http://ei.yale.edu/mood-meter-app/)

keep it up!

</comment><comment><USER9> Pretty neat; reminds me of the Daylio app which I've been using daily for over a year. I do like the app because it has reminder notifications, which I suppose is something you could monetize. Really the smart thing to do would be to also release an app that uses the same data store. If you want to make it really awesome, write some tools for analysis i.e. charts, word clouds, etc. that people can look at over time.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reminder notifications and tools for analysis are definitely in my mind. These two features are _must haves_ for an app like this. I will probably go more through a PWA route; I am the sole developer on this and I don't think I can maintain two native apps (at least not until it is a solid, profitable product).

Another features I am considering applying are voice recordings and sharing with close friends. Do you have an opinion about these features?

<comment><USER10> You can use the same codebase to service mobile platforms with something like Cordova. It still needs some effort but gives you access to the app stores, which can be huge acquisition channels.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree. I built it in React. If I have some validation that the product is good, I will probably rewrite it in React Native Web, sharing one codebase for all three platforms

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am building a mood tracking/journaling site, and I would like to have some early users to give me feedback. It is something I am doing for-profit, but currently, there is only a free plan.

It is on the web (rather than an app), so you don't have to worry with backups, changing phones, etc. And if you like to write, it is better to write on a desktop.

If you are interested, please let me know what you think.

<comment><USER11> why does this have to be on the in the cloud? would be nice to allow data saved only in local storage (and make the syncing optional).

I understand then it's harder to monetize, but you don't need infrastructure if it runs locally and for the user it's a privacy (security) win. Consider that people are gonna use it as a diary/journal and IMO having this saved in the cloud is extremely privacy intrusive so I'd at least would expect more info about encryption of data at rest. There is no end to end encryption so I assume this is by design and people will see ads in future based on their "mood"?

I think it's not ethical to extract money from users this way in 2019. There is no _value-add_ from it being in the cloud (you wouldn't have any problem with scaling infra cost if it runs locally).

Also security headers: [https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quidsentio....](https://securityheaders.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.quidsentio.com%2F&followRedirects=on)

fwiw I find the idea itself quite cool but in it's current design wouldn't touch it with a stick.

<comment><AUTHOR> No, I won't use ad based on moods. I plan to create a business model based on subscriptions (once I have more valuable features).

I am thinking about the best way to secure the information, I am just not sure about the tradeoffs.

edit: thanks for the security headers link, I will work on it</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Freshpoint – minimalist sass setup with your favorite UI library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vincentntang/freshpoint <comment><AUTHOR> so some context

I'm work with different startups and teams at times, everyone has a different opinion of what UI library to use on top of React, Angular, Vue

At the end of the day we always have to write a small minimalistic sass library because from my experience that's what most people are comfortable with

I find myself constantly writing the same boilerplate so I wrote this instead. Also its super opinionated, based on my experiences of what I liked / disliked about ideas such as Atomic Design principles etc. And what worked / didn't work when working with different teams

Designed to be used with bootstrap, material UI, or just standalone

I personally don't like using CSS-in-JS because it takes too long for me to write, requires the team to understand, and requires too much tooling imo</comment>


How we survived HackerNews using Docker and AWS - <AUTHOR> https://www.loopperfect.com/blog/how-we-survived-hackernews/ <comment><USER2> If you have to use a load balancer for 10,000 pageviews and only 200 concurrent then there is an issue with your architecture. You shouldn't need a load balancer for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> > the compiler environment requires 1.2GHz and 100MB of working memory per > user

> with around 5 containers on each EC2 instance

how do you handle new and leaving users without a loadbalancer, given these facts?</comment></comment>


Show HN: Frappe Charts – GitHub inspired JavaScript charting with zero dependencies - <AUTHOR> https://frappe.github.io/charts/ <comment><USER2> Impressive! What are the supported browsers? What are your plans going forward?

<comment><USER3> Supported across all major browsers :) We've covered much ground on the most used charts (while the heatmap just happened to be something we needed) and have the basic components down. That'll facilitate putting in, say, more axis charts in future. We're sure of not running out of ideas, there are just so many chart types out there :D

<comment><USER2> Do you have a separate repo with unit tests? If not, how do you test the charts?

<comment><USER4> [https://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is- Waste...](https://rbcs-us.com/documents/Why-Most-Unit-Testing-is-Waste.pdf)

<comment><USER2> I have really bad experience using controls that didn't have a large test suite. They don't have to be "unit" , I just care about the ratio of the number of state transitions it tests to possible state transitions. If that library was written in typescript (or some other strongly typed language), I'd been slightly less worried about the lack of tests, and possibly slightly more convinced to try it out in its early stage.

<comment><USER4> I agree, unit tests wouldn't be very useful here, i was thing that visual regression tests with constant data, that capture graph image and compare with older version for regressions would have been really nice here.

<comment><USER2> As a side note: I find these kind of tests flaky, because the antialiasing doesn't seem stable at constant resolution on the same machine & browsers when you repeat tests. When you do a fuzzy compare (ie. allow for X pixels difference), then you are always chasing the golden middle. A test I would like to see for a control is trigger multiple state transitions (for example change 5 properties of a chart), do assertions on the generated DOM.

Unless maybe some HNer knows how to do such SVG/picture testing non flaky?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's so good! I am thoroughly impressed with its performance and the dynamic data binding. I discovered in comments that there's a frappe-gantt chart as well, would be nice if such "extra" plugins were listed on homepage (since the gantt example is even more impressive!).

All the best for the project. Are you looking for community contributions?

<comment><USER6> Yes, community contributions are always welcome. Right now, we have specifically covered the cases we needed for our product. So, it'd be cool if we can make these as generic as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The biggest thing I find missing from most charts is their ability to interactively and dynamically chart over a large data set.

I once found a chart ( can't find it again ) that was super ugly but had a nice scheme for dynamically loading and caching data at different zoom levels that made the chart very snappy

<comment><USER8> You rarely can visualize anything meaningful of large dataset on screen. You can draw 100k data points on screen easily. But human brain rarely can make sense of those data points. What you need to do is to analyze and create filters to present meaningful insights from the dataset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work. The code itself is clear and concise also.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! We tried many approaches, but the simplicity of object oriented UI components is classic. Its much more refreshing to read old fashioned object oriented code vs hybrid libraries that seem to be trending these days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is the annual heatmap supposed to be empty?

Also, for the clickable charts, clicking on the popover should count as well. If the bar is really short it can be quite hard to click on, such as the 2007 entry in the first chart.

<comment><USER3> We gave it too less data than it deserved I believe.

Thanks for reporting the click problem. Would you mind creating an issue at GitHub, so that we can keep track?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This looks great. Can I ask why you didn't use chart.js?

<comment><USER3> The argument would be no different from all the products out there who design their own UI (MUX, GitHub). Our framework Frappé (and product ERPNext) has a great emphasis on minimal style, and we really wished the charts to be free of visual clutter (not have too many measure markings for instance). Something that even the customizing API should take care off. Chartjs is awesome and very comprehensive, it just didn't go too well with our look and feel :)

<comment><USER11> chart.js isn't perfect, but it's pretty easy to customise and remove/change any element you don't like. I find it hard to believe it was easier for you to create an entirely new charting library than to set the option to remove ticks.

I'm not complaining because it's always good to have options and I really like the look of your library. I just find it a very curious use of resources.

Of course, it's your business and you can do whatever you like with it regardless of whether you have a good reason. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks nice, 0 dependency, simple design but there is one issue...

I see that you don't have a single unit test or integration or functional etc.

Even if your in house developers know what they are doing (which is a myth, stuff will break) it's going to be difficult accept contributions from community without any tests that make (almost) sure existing features are working with the changes.

<comment><USER13> Judge work by what it does, not by what it doesn't have.

Like users, programmers don't care whether programs have tests as long as it does what it needs to do.

<comment><USER12> So I should wait until stuff starts breaking, then start complaining.

<comment><USER14> If nothing breaks why would you complain?

<comment><USER12> In that case, I wouldn't. But I believe that it will happen eventually, this is not a 10lines project, has many lines of code and since it's new, I expect a lot to be changed. Then those changes are going to break features.

<comment><USER14> If you are worried about them breaking it as they develop it, but like the current implementation then just use the current implementation.

If you feel like having tests are a blocking feature for you then just watch this issue: [https://github.com/frappe/charts/issues/7](https://github.com/frappe/charts/issues/7)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> D3 doesn't have dependencies. Why use this?

<comment><USER16> D3 is not a charting library but a data visualization library with which one can produce standard charts. The code required to create a simple line chart in D3 spans dozens of lines, not including the data. Using a charting library it is usually one or two (plus options).

<comment><USER17> Lots of libs advertise 0 dependencies. I'm not fussed if a library depends on D3 though. D3 is 80k gzipped, this is 15k gzipped, ChartJS is about 20k gzipped. If you need one chart, sure, go for it.

But each of those libraries would be <5kb of D3-dependent code. With the added benefit that:

1\. The code is much simpler and easier to understand and contribute to

2\. Knowing D3 means you can modify the visuals, fork the library, and customize it without spending ages wading through unnecessary and unfamiliar re-implementations of D3 primitives. So many requirements I've seen involve tweaking visuals just far enough that a pre-baked library ceases to cut it.

3\. Chart authors can rely on those primitives for a less buggy experience, given that they are tested and used elsewhere

4\. D3 already supports IE9+, which this library doesn't

5\. You have the power of D3 to build your own dataviz

<comment><USER15> Yea, I've found similar use case where any custom work is much better off done using raw d3.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Well timed. I'm in the middle of trying to figure out how to replace some C3 charts. Looks very nice!

</comment><comment><USER19> Really nice work on this. Does it support pie charts currently? If not, any plans to do so in the future?

<comment><USER3> Check our take on why they weren't a priority for us, and we went with percentage charts (the 'Why percentage?' link on the website): [http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/2011/07/death-to- pi...](http://www.storytellingwithdata.com/blog/2011/07/death-to-pie-charts)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I noticed, when viewing the demos on my phone, that there were some issues relating to responsiveness. Specifically, the axes labels were overlapping. Is responsiveness a priority with this library?

Other than that, great work. I look forward to testing this out.

<comment><USER3> > Is responsiveness a priority with this library?

It sure is. Just pushed a fix, thanks for reporting :) Do report any issues you find over at [https://github.com/frappe/charts/issues](https://github.com/frappe/charts/issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This look really nice. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER22> Question: For codebases that are all about package managers Yarn, what's best practice for integrating something like this? Just push it into a 'vendor' folder?

<comment><USER23> It depends on how the library is implemented, so you're expected to look at the source.

If you're using something like Webpack and the library just places everything on the global scope, you can configure exports-loader [0]. That way you can reference the module as if it were written with CJS or ESM, without having to change the source.

If it's not published on npm, you can reference the git repo along with the specific release tag you want to use. My suggestion would be to fork the repo and point to your fork in package.json, so things continue to work if the original repo ever gets taken down.

[0] [https://webpack.js.org/loaders/exports- loader/](https://webpack.js.org/loaders/exports-loader/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Yeah this is really impressive. Right now I can't think of a use case for it but if I need charts like this in the future I will most likely use this be library.

</comment><comment><USER25> Any support for realtime/updating graphs on the fly?

</comment><comment><USER26> This charts looks awesome. Will surely use in my next project. Can I know how I can add two data points. I mean how to show two graph lines in single chart?

<comment><USER27> The second example seems to do just that, if you switch to "line chart".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Really cool that this is built completely from scratch. I expected a dependency on something like d3 at least.

<comment><USER3> Thanks! That just about answers the burning question: why another charting library? It all boiled down to us needing some simple charts for our report data; nothing fancy, just something that went with our classic design. All we needed was some mappers to translate numbers to relatively sized shapes (or positions). The graphs over at GitHub looked awesome to start the styles from; from there on we focussed on making them generic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The annual heatmap is particularly cool, and not something I've seen in many (any?) other libraries.

<comment><USER3> We used cal-heatmap ([https://github.com/wa0x6e/cal- heatmap](https://github.com/wa0x6e/cal-heatmap)) earlier. It's pretty neat.

<comment><USER29> Looks awesome, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is great. Thank you!

</comment><comment><USER31> Looks Neat. Great work folks.

</comment><comment><USER32> Well done!

</comment><comment><USER33> No stacked bar charts, unfortunate. Looks really nice.

<comment><USER34> it's called - "Contribution".

[https://i.imgur.com/gKQ7EMP.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/gKQ7EMP.jpg)</comment></comment>


Haribo Gummi Bears Amazon Reviews - <AUTHOR> https://www.amazon.com/Haribo-SUGAR-Classic-Gummi-Bears/product-reviews/B006J1FBLM <comment><USER2> What's the appeal of eating sugar free Haribo if they give you gas and diarrhea?

<comment> just-juan-post The artificial sweeteners are what create the gas and diarrhea. Sweeteners can affect people differently but more importantly it's the quantity that they eat.

If I have a couple sugar-free Lifesavers I'll fart a little bit more. If I say at the whole bag of sugar free gummy bears in 10 minutes well then I would be running to a toilet soon.

It's the surprise element. Most people don't know these things so they eat a bunch like normal then quickly realize their mistake.</comment></comment>


Domino portrait of Martin Gardner - <AUTHOR> http://www.knowltonmosaics.com/pages/Martin.htm

<comment><AUTHOR> OK, this isn't new, it isn't news, and it was done (not by me, I hasten to add!) by hand, without a computer, and I think it's impressive. It's a portrait of Martin Gardner using 6 sets of 9x9 dominoes.

Knowing Gardner's work for decades, I was honored to be able to spend an afternoon with him in March, 2010. Still wonderfully active and inventive at the age of 95, I felt seriously out-classed in so many ways. Having read so many of his books, I felt I knew him, and he was kind, generous and friendly, as if he knew me. This portrait was on the wall.

I'll miss him.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner></comment>


AWS Users Are Leaving Security Holes - <AUTHOR> http://www.csoonline.com/article/684760/researchers-aws-users-are-leaving-security-holes <comment><USER2> tl/dr: people publish their AMIs and leave sensitive stuff in them.

</comment><comment><USER3> The researchers created a scanner that is supposed to check for these vulnerabilities:

<https://code.google.com/p/amid/>

Its readme contains some links that appear worth reading, if you're deploying AMIs securely.

The researchers' own page on this story:

<http://trust.cased.de/AMID></comment>


How Bees Argue - <AUTHOR> http://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/01/how-bees-argue.html <comment><USER3> The most interesting thing I've ever seen was an argument between ants. As a student I worked on a project to use California grey ants for pest control in peach orchards 'Formica aerata' (it's very effective). This involved capturing wild colonies (digging them up) and breeding them in captivity. To move the colony from the box of dug up dirt to the enclosure, I coated the inside of the box with liquid Teflon (future cancer risk?) and slowly flooded the box, the only way out was a bridge to the new enclosure. Over the next ten hours the ants would compete, some moving eggs and larvae to the new enclosure, some moving them back to the queen. Eventually, when the rising flood had converted enough of the workers to the cause of the revolution, they will make an attempt to move the queen, which she and and a coiterie of anti-diluvianists would resist. The bridge to new enclosure would be a solid mass of writhing black (like Venom from Spider-Man). The queen, noticeably larger than the workers would repeat an escape and climb back over the living bridge to the steadily submerging dirt pile again and again, until eventually overwhelmed she was dragged by the masses to the new home, flailing and struggling all the way.

<comment><USER4> (Imagining "anti-diluvianist" ants cracked me up, especially because of the double pun.)

Does that mean the ants were unable to communicate the upcoming danger to each other and had to rely on first-hand observation? That's surprising given how much they communicate otherwise.

<comment><USER3> I don't know, but the way I thought about it is that I imagined each ant was quite simple, and the fight was a distributed mind weighing the sum of the fractions of reality perceived by each individual

<comment><USER5> I saw a video quite a few years ago where they dump some ants on a platform, with a string leading to another platform with an area that (apparently) seemed like a decent home. (the below is according to my fallible memories)

One ant wandered to the good area and checked it all out. She then marched back to the others, and bodily lifted another and took her to the good area. They both inspected the area and each repeated the trek to pull in another ant. This continued until "enough" ants were in the new area and they shifted into "build a nest" mode.

It felt very oversimplified for TV viewers, but nonetheless was fascinating - a breakdown of just HOW some simple models can lead to more complex emergent behavior. I just tried to find this video without success (on the bright side, there are a ton of OTHER fascinating ant videos out there)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Takeaways:

* It is meaningful to speak of animals having "opinions" but it's not clear how those match up with human ones.

* Individual opinion is guided by a combination of random chance and direct perception.

* Individual bee opinions have low success rate, but group consensus of bees has an extremely high success rate.

* Opinions acquired via transmission are more weakly held than opinions acquired directly.

* Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find this fascinating because it means there's some information that would not be revealed without the bees challenging each other.

* Opinions are often never changed in an individual, even if they are wrong.

<comment><USER7> > Wrong opinions are held more weakly than right opinions. I find this > fascinating because it means there's some information that would not be > revealed without the bees challenging each other.

This seems to be an emergent effect of a system where every individual scout explicitly communicates a degree of confidence, and the rest of the system can trust the degree of confidence expressed by its individuals so that noise in the actual signal (a scout bee mis-evaluating the quality of a potential home) can be smoothed out a larger number of inputs.

That sounds a lot like the one-armed bandit for A/B testing!

That's an interesting comparison to modern human society, where you can't at all trust how confident someone sounds, because everyone has learned to game that system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Inspired by the behavior of bees and the Seeley's Honeybee Democracy book, I created and gave a talk, titled Extreme Cooperation of Superorganisms - <USER2> Lessons Humans Can Learn from Bees: [https://slides.com/petermoskovits/superorganism/](https://slides.com/petermoskovits/superorganism/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Do we know how bees encode location data in their dances? Do we have a catalog of their dances? I mean does 3 butt wiggles followed by a head bob mean go towards the sun until you smell lavender?

</comment><comment><USER10> >Waiting another hour or so gives enough time for scouts to return from other sites, and then the entire cluster heads off together to this new site

What happens if a bee is late coming back and everyone is gone?

<comment><USER11> This happens regularly, the bee cluster doesn't wait for late comers. There are some scouts that keep going there and back but there are also scouts that do that with the "Correct" destination, so they "lead" the stray ones to their new home eventually. In the end most bees end up where they're supposed to.

It's much worse when a beekeeper takes the swarm tho. Speaking from experience, you can see "lost" scouts going to and from the temporary cluster from their destinations for days after you moved the cluster into a new hive. The reason is because there's noone going from cluster to new hive since no scout found that destination. It's a bit heartbreaking.

I collected the "leftover" mini-clusters 4 times in a row coz I felt responsible...

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm trying to make this DIY beehive [https://www.ikkaro.net/diy- beehive/](https://www.ikkaro.net/diy-beehive/) and I hope to observe his behavior soon.

</comment><comment><USER13> Borrowing cryptocurrency terms, this seems to be a Proof of Excitement consensus algorithm

</comment><comment><USER14> Nice to see overcoming bias post. Do people still read LW?</comment>


Lean - <AUTHOR> http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/09/lean.html

<comment><USER2> Is it just me, or does the timing sound like the tech boom/bust cycle which could be expected to affect the results of all VCs, fat or lean?

"In the first two or three years of Flatiron, it was basically just me and Jerry. We were deeply engaged in all of our investments and we had one or two employees other than ourselves. We did very well in that period. In mid 1999, we went on a binge, raised a huge fund ($350mm), moved into a massive office, hired a staff of 25, made investments we weren't engaged in, and got fat. We did poorly in that period. We shuttered Flatiron in 2001 and I took over the entire portfolio with the help of Jerry and Bob. It was basically back to the early model. We did very well in that period."

<comment><USER3> Exactly. But even if that weren't the case business is about risk taking. They did poorly because the market tanked and/or they made bad bets. Had neither of those two things occurred the offices and the people would have been fine. (A rising tide and all of that.)

What he is really saying is that there is less risk with less people since he can more carefully manage the risk when he doesn't have a hand in so many pots. And that works in that type of a business. It's certainly not what the investors of groupon want.

That being said if Fred didn't spend time writing a blog he would have more time to manage more investments. I'm sure he devotes many hours per day to that blog. But he has decided he is happy with the amount of deals and activity he is doing right now and the other benefits he gets from blogging (attracting better deals and potential celebrity).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Something amused me about this post - its a bit like a diet guru flying to Somalia and extolling the virtues of a low-carb diet.

Innovation is born from constraint. Entrepreneurs are relentlessly resourceful because they have to be - not because they can be.

When a VC firm runs on a minimal team, its because it is the preferred model out of many choices. When a startup runs on minimal resources, its because they have no other choice.

The point of lean startup is to focus on learning about customers, and use every conceivable resource to evolve the product team's understanding of how to deliver a great user experience. Things change when the organization becomes well resourced - its not about saving up your pennies anymore to figure out how to learn - its about allocating the resources you have most efficiently to achieve a goal (Occam's razor).

Fred writes awesome posts, but being lean out of necessity will always create a different culture than being lean as a choice and the article did not make this very meaningful distinction.

<comment><USER5> I think being lean out of choice is substantially superior. If you're lean only out of necessity, then you're in deep trouble when necessity vanishes.

Even in a startup where you're lean by necessity, there are plenty of opportunities to be more efficient still. That's especially true when you're talking about long-term efficiencies. Being lean in a considered way means you're more able to avoid the sort of penny-wise, pound-foolish decisions that a low bank balance can encourage.

<comment><USER4> I didn't mean constraint in the sense of not having capital - more in the sense of not having enough resources (people, connections, knowledge, skills, time, capital, etc) to overcome the external obstacles your perceive on the way to accomplishing the goal of the company.

You can have plenty of money in the bank and still be in a business where you need to capture a huge market that is cost prohibitive before the company is sustainable. Or perhaps fend off a competitor with more resources at their disposal. That is constraint, that is necessity vs choice - this kind of lean culture requires throwing everything you have at the problem plus getting clever to make up for the resources you lack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For fellow developers worried that "Lean" is just a buzzword, I've got two books to recommend:

"Lean Software Development" by Mary Poppendieck. Talks about what Lean Manufacturing principles look like when applied to software development: <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0321150783>

"Toyota Kata" by Mike Rother. Nominally about Toyota's personnel management. Actually about the philosophy behind Lean, and how most American companies trying Lean are missing the deeper point. <http://www.amazon.com/dp/0071635238>

To me, Lean is what you get when engineers think sufficiently hard about the nature of business. It is deeply different than the MBA dogma that passes for business thinking in the US.

<comment><USER6> Why are a couple of books any kind of evidence that "Lean" is more than a buzzword?

Airport book stores have many buzzword books for sale :-)

<comment><USER5> This may come as a surprise, but if you open a book you will find it has contents. You can even read them if you want. It is the contents of those books I was referring people to.

<comment><USER6> Perhaps you find the idea of clarifying your comment surprising and that's why you respond with sarcasm.

Why do you think - _fellow developers worried that "Lean" is just a buzzword_ \- would be willing to invest their time reading books about something they are already worried is just a buzzword?

<comment><USER5> Because some people know the difference between leaping to a conclusion and learning a little something before they make up their mind. And because many developers would sincerely like to improve the way they work, giving the motivation to seek out new approaches.

<comment><USER6> We have limited time. There are more new approaches than we have time to evaluate. Should choose which approaches to evaluate based on whether someone's selling a book and a training course?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great post and something that is necessary to make sure that the "lean movement" is not perceived as something brand new that was not known to any of us earlier. Eric and Steve have done a stellar stellar job of "teaching lean" and making it easy to understand. But lean has existed in product development, engineering, operations and other functional areas for a long time and the successful people have done these exact things for a long time. But it was never before as well defined and given a name - which Steve and Eric done so brilliantly.

</comment><comment><USER8> I feel like you can substitute the word "better" for all occurrences of "lean" in the article and no meaning is lost.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lean versus fat is not the question. The question is smart versus foolish.

Just how to write software and how to do an information technology (IT) startup have evolved over the past 10-20 years due to (1) much more capable computers for much less money, (2) great progress in 'infrastructure' software, (3) the Internet, and (4) the broad idea of the 'social Web'.

So, it's possible to have a rough, maybe 'social', 'business idea', write some prototype code, see how well users like it, revise, iterate, etc.

However the old approach can remain an opportunity: Pick a big problem where a much better solution would be very valuable; find a good solution, even if implemented in software, possibly based mostly not just on routine software, wrap the solution in whatever user interface is needed, and present the result to the people who wanted the problem solved. Here are not really 'in search of a problem users would like to have solved or a business model' and, instead, did pick a good problem to begin with. Here 'lean' with lots of 'pivots' and 'iterations' is not very appropriate, and the 'lean' movement doesn't bring much that is new and good.</comment>


The Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Some Things Offline - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/us/09privacy.html

<comment><USER2> Finally. I've been wondering when all the people on Facebook would start wondering about their privacy. Hopefully facebook will see some backlash and have to stop making it harder and harder to remain private.

I wonder if this is the opening for a new, more private social networking site?

</comment><comment><USER3> This ended like an Onion article:

> That was the experience of Kanupriya Tewari, a 19-year-old pre-med student > at Tufts University. Recently she sought to limit the information a friend > could see on Facebook but found the process cumbersome. "I spent like an > hour trying to figure out how to limit my profile, and I couldn't," she > said. She gave up because she had chemistry homework to do, but vowed to > figure it out after finals.</comment>


D-Wave confirmed as the first real quantum computer by new research - <AUTHOR> http://www.extremetech.com/computing/184242-d-wave-confirmed-as-the-first-real-quantum-computer-by-new-research

<comment><USER2> I really had to do some digging for the source. But it appears to be 'old news' i.e. 2 weeks old. The publications was made by D-Wave on May 30th [1]. The paper is here [2].

[1] [http://www.dwavesys.com/press-releases/latest-research- valid...](http://www.dwavesys.com/press-releases/latest-research-validates- quantum-entanglement-d-wave-systems)

[2] [https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.021041](https://journals.aps.org/prx/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevX.4.021041)</comment>


Delete your account - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/28/delete-your-account <comment><USER2> > Journalists need your technical expertise to secure their devices, set up > secure drops, and understand the data coming out of the countless leaks that > are sure to come.

This strikes me as hypocrisy seeing as almost everyone, including the media, threw WikiLeaks under the bus last year.

<comment><USER3> That is because WikiLeaks decided to become politically opportunistic with what they chose to leak and when they chose to leak it, instead of simply leaking everything immediately after receipt.

<comment><USER4> It was the content that did the damage not the timing. There was a lot of unethical and illegal activity that was exposed. Those implicated are are not fit to hold office.

<comment><USER3> I agree with you that the content was absolutely damaging.

The Podesta leaks began 1 hour after Trump's pussy-grabbing video was published, and continued every single day until November 9th. The timing was absolutely strategic and politically motivated. If you still think the timing wasn't relevant, I have a bridge to sell you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > "Ignore their false produce and read real news from a real source you trust. > Pay for media."

Brought to you by the very people selling your data, infecting your computers with malvertisements, bowing to their corporate masters and shoveling you shill-dirt for breakfast lunch and dinner.

Don't do ANY of that bullshit. Use the tools available to you. If you don't someone else will, and they probably already do.

Don't go back to the way we were; it was horrid. Don't let the corporate hegemony rule you through news. They've been doing that for centuries. Fight back AGAINST THEM!

You heard me. AGAINST THEM, not with them.

<comment><USER6> > Brought to you by the very people selling your data, infecting your > computers with malvertisements, bowing to their corporate masters and > shoveling you shill-dirt for breakfast lunch and dinner.

Buy a newspaper.

Edit: Or a weekly periodical which employs fact-checkers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I found it ironic that the "Delete your account" post had a Facebook feed underneath it.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's kinda cute that he thinks that "marching" is where change happens. Marching is just a mildly evolved form of impotently virtue signalling on Twitter.

<comment><USER9> Unless you're a celebrity, Tweeting for change is probably worse than pointless, but it can be cathartic.

Meanwhile, protests have actually spurred change throughout history. See Gandhi, the Civil Rights movement, Tea Party protests, to name just a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fuck that, don't silence yourself. There's no reason why you can't get involved in other ways as well.

<comment><USER11> It doesn't need to be framed as "silencing yourself". It could be framed as "withdrawing from the clusterfuck" or "preferring other mediums of information exchange".

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Well I just did it a few days back [1].

It is working great, I am closer and closer to release _server_ [2] and working on my Japanese which got rustly.

[1] [https://medium.com/@fpresencia/i-am-not- superman-54b54e8ab49...](https://medium.com/@fpresencia/i-am-not- superman-54b54e8ab491)

[2] [https://github.com/franciscop/server](https://github.com/franciscop/server)

<comment><USER13> (Server) Looks cool. What is the intended benefit over something like express?

<comment><USER12> Thank! In v1.0 most of the things that were deprecated from Express 4.0 [1] (and a couple more) work out of the box. On v1.1 you get websockets for free[2] as a router method and a plugin system that goes way beyond what is possible with express middleware so other integrations are possible (think about _passport_ , _aws ' s3_ and the likes).

Truth be told, for the initial release I only expect 2 groups of people to truly benefit from this: those creating new projects on a regular basis and those getting started with Node.js. I've taught to some people how to get started with Node.js and since Express 4.0 it's been quite _challenging_ so I expect this to really help.

[1] [http://expressjs.com/en/guide/migrating-4.html](http://expressjs.com/en/guide/migrating-4.html)

[2] Not yet available (and wouldn't work on jsfiddle anyway): [https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/6ca5gzn7/](https://jsfiddle.net/franciscop/6ca5gzn7/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > If you're running a startup delete your account and look up from your > laptop.

> If you're a VC cut ties from members of your class that actively destroy > free speech and rant about the coming dystopia.

This is just pants on fire hysteria. Its destructive to productive communities where it takes a lot of silent toil and concentration by a varied group of people to get anything done. Programming is not political activism. Neither is starting a technology company. Neither is starting an open source project.

Software development is not exhibitionism. You can not have a few drinks and show up with a sign and snappy chant and build a database or compiler. You can not get a game engine working marching through the streets.

All of these Social issues have nothing to do with programming or computer science. Its just a obnoxious divisive distraction by people who looking for followers.

</comment><comment><USER14> For developers is a bit harder, as sometimes a project requires the Facebook API and you only can use it if you have an account there. And what about the events and groups created there to organize meetings, manifestations etc?

<comment><USER15> Not to mention releases and announcements that industry folks release on twitter. For me, it's usually JS related, and I hope that js.org becomes the go-to resource that it has the potential to be.

<comment><USER14> I guess that Twitter enables you to follow profiles through e-mail, while Facebook doesn't (walled garden). So, maybe you could live without Twitter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> >Volunteer to help immigrants assimilate

I thought the idea of immigrants assimilating was considered "racist" nowadays.

Perhaps Trump really has moved the Overton window a bit?

<comment><USER17> Would "feel welcome" make it better for you?</comment></comment>


When Einstein Tilted at Windmills - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/when-einstein-tilted-at-windmills <comment><USER2> Very well-written article. I had no idea Ernst Mach had a mystical experience that he based his theories on. Very interesting.

"On a bright summer day in the open air, the world with my ego suddenly appeared to me as one coherent mass of sensations," he later wrote. He felt, in that moment, there was no reality sitting "out there," independent of his sensations, and likewise that there was no self sitting "in here," independent of its sensations. He grew certain that there could be no real difference between mind and matter, between perceiving subject and perceived object. "This moment was decisive for my whole view," he wrote.

<comment><USER3> Wish I had a circle of academically awesome, out-of-the-box thinking friends. Does such a thing even exist? All the smart people I know are busy working hard, no one is coming up with wild stuff "on a bright summer day in the open air" any more it seems.

<comment><USER4> Yes, it definitely does.

The problem is that it happens in little cliques of 2-3 people, and it's hard to meet a new clique. (I mostly do intoxicated at parties.)

I've been thinking of trying to organize "Work in Chalk" parties or something next summer, where we can all go hang out and work on our theories in sidewalk chalk at the park. (I used to do homework this way in uni.)

It's just hard to guage how many people would be interested and how to reach them.

<comment><USER5> Create a Meetup for interested parties, perhaps? Then you can have small groups of participants pare off each month for weekly meetings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Interesting. The theories of relativity have philosophical implications, and it's interesting to see that they didn't come only from mathematics and experiment, but also from reading and debating philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER7> Very interesting read, thanks for sharing. It seems the people of that era had a whole perspective we no longer share, or at least no longer share with each other. Will articles in the future convey the inspiration and humanity of modern ground-breakers, their relationships with each other, the connections they had to each other? I truly hope so.

<comment><USER8> A lot of great ideas come from collaborations between people.

Thinking Fast and Slow was written by one man but he talks about the great walks he took with his friend which he claims was the best work he ever did.

A married couple figured out X-rays and revolutionized medicine.

Jobs and Wozniak revolutionized computing.

It takes two to tango... very few people are alone in their ventures. The most successful people are those who can surround themselves well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The lessons of this story are hugely important. Coming of age in a state of hyper-anxiety about our careers (as many of us do), we're used to thinking of our heroes role models as paragons of not just of efficiency and discipline, but above all, clarity of purpose and direction. In reality, quite often the reverse is true.

</comment><comment><USER10> >[Besso's] weakness is his truly insufficient spirit of decision

That sounds like a slightly Victorian way of describing ADHD. The entire quote is basically a paraphrasing of something every intelligent kid with ADHD has probably heard a million times, "You are so smart, why don't you just do your work?"

<comment><USER11> an anxiety disorder can increase the difficulty of making decisions, appearing as a trait like "perfectionism"

<comment><USER10> ADHD has a high co-morbidity with anxiety disorders.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's a shame Einstein couldn't see the work being done now in constructing space-time from quantum entanglement relationships. I wonder if he would have accepted it.

<comment><USER13> I haven't heard of that. Where can I learn more?

<comment><USER12> This is a decent overview: [http://www.nature.com/news/the-quantum-source-of- space-time-...](http://www.nature.com/news/the-quantum-source-of-space- time-1.18797) (edit: depending on how much you already know, you may need to skim the early parts)

There was another paper where (IIRC) they flat out derived basics of geometry from entanglement, but I don't remember what it was called. Hopefully someone else knows...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I understand that when telling a story, adding details and texture is necessary to immerse the reader, but parts of this article broke my immersion

> Besso was short with narrow, pointed features and a thick pile of coarse > black hair on his head and chin.

That's a fairly objective description - there's even a photo of him. Moving along.

> ...Einstein had a look of cool detachment. Besso had the look of a nervous > mystic.

Come on! We need an "artist's impression" disclaimer here.

</comment><comment><USER15> Or... Einstein, the reluctant Kantian.</comment>


Future of the human climate niche - <AUTHOR> https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/28/1910114117 <comment><USER2> The definition of "suitability" here seems a bit suspect. For example, this image [1] implies that a vast swathe of western and northern Australia is currently "highly suitable", whereas the actual Pilbara [1] and Kimberley [2] are both very hot and dry, and (outside a narrow coastal fringe) generally thoroughly unsuitable for agriculture and settlement.

[1] [https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/04/28/191011411...](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2020/04/28/1910114117/F4.large.jpg?width=800&height=600&carousel=1)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilbara)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_(Western_Australia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberley_\(Western_Australia\))

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting that it appears by looking at the visuals, a great deal more of land mass will become more suitable over the next 50 years, mostly in Canada and Russia. Investment opportunity?

<comment><USER4> I recall watching a documentary in the 00s where someone claimed to be buying land in Russia specifically because of this.

<comment> blaser-waffle Not someone buying land, Russian Oligarchs who already own it. They're cool (har har) with global warming because it lets them use whole swaths of land and get easy access to resources -- otherwise most of Russia is just frozen tundra.

Who cares if a bunch of Indian coastal cities get flooded if you have a breadbasket and tons of oil?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a study on migration patterns resulting from an assumed combination of global warming as predicted by other scientists and nothing changing in between now and then. It's not actually predicting this extreme heat; merely citing studies that do and extrapolating from that.

That's an interesting scenario to explore from a demographics point of view under the assumption that nothing changes. But it's not necessarily what is going to happen given the current technical progress on clean energy, farming practices, tackling desertification, etc. IMHO taking coal plants and most ICE vehicles out of the equation in the next decades is going to help reduce smog and co2 emissions. Concrete and cement are currently actually a bigger problem and there too there are alternative technologies emerging.

It won't stop global warming but it will enable us to engineer our way out of (or at least around) some of its consequences. Clearly anything over 50-60 degrees C is not sustainable. The Saudi's are currently dealing with those kind of temperatures already on a regular basis. However, replanting forests in e.g. Africa or India or large scale ecosystem engineering in China seems to result in drastically different micro climate in those places where that happens. We've barely scratched the surface of what is possible there in a relatively short amount of time at relatively modest expense. Lower temperature, better water retention, higher farming yields, etc. Three decades is a long time for absolutely nothing to happen on that front.

As for northern regions. What's bad for the world is not necessarily unpleasant there. I live in Berlin at 52 degrees latitude and used to live in Finland at 60 degrees latitude. Most of the world at similar southern latitudes are ocean. But longer nicer summers are not necessarily a punishment for people living there. And actually it's quite enjoyable. It's not all universally bad. And also it's not historically unprecedented for things to be a bit warmer up north given fossil records.

</comment><comment><USER6> How many degrees Celsius hotter would that be for billions of people in 50 years?

> _The Paris Agreement 's long-term temperature goal is to keep the increase > in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial > levels; and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 °C, recognizing > that this would substantially reduce the risks and impacts of climate > change. This should be done by reducing emissions as soon as possible, in > order to "achieve a balance between anthropogenic emissions by sources and > removals by sinks of greenhouse gases" in the second half of the 21st > century. It also aims to increase the ability of parties to adapt to the > adverse impacts of climate change, and make "finance flows consistent with a > pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient > development."_

> _Under the Paris Agreement, each country must determine, plan, and regularly > report on the contribution that it undertakes to mitigate global warming. > [6] No mechanism forces [7] a country to set a specific emissions target by > a specific date, [8] but each target should go beyond previously set > targets._

And then this is what was decided:

> _In June 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intention to > withdraw the United States from the agreement. Under the agreement, the > earliest effective date of withdrawal for the U.S. is November 2020, shortly > before the end of President Trump 's 2016 term. In practice, changes in > United States policy that are contrary to the Paris Agreement have already > been put in place.[9]_

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement)

<comment><USER7> Does anyone meet their targets?

<comment><USER6> That's a good question,

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The crops we cultivate to feed ourselves and our animal slaves are grown outside. It's a obvious statement, but it feels easy to forget when we spend most hours of the day indoors. Key stages in plant development are sensitive to temperatures. I used to think, it's just a few degrees of warming. Well a few degrees hotter at a critical time of plant growth will affect yields of key staple crops like rice [1]. There's a lot of suffering to come this century.

[1] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B978012387...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780123876898000047)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is so depressing. Covid is obviously terrible (and I'm one of the fortunate ones for whom it has barely touched) and but at least it has temporarily distracted me from dwelling on the unfolding climate disaster.

When is humanity going to get a grip on this? We know what the outcomes are and we know what the fixes are yet we're doing ~nothing. I have a huge feeling of constant background dread for the future.

<comment><USER10> > we're doing ~nothing

A lot of people are doing something.

Some do a lot by actively working on solutions, many do a little by preserving energy and reducing their personal consumption (especially meat and transportation/travel).

If you feel dread you should do more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> And we will ignore all these warnings, because why should we care?

Extinction is a goal we have unconsciously targeted and we are going to achieve it.

<comment><USER12> I have the same weird feeling, like, if a culture or society grows too old. It acts more and more like a real old human. Like a real 90 year old...

<comment><USER13> Humanity is acting more like a Toddler, with guns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This reminds me of the "Glaciers will melt within X years" studies, which ended up being wrong[1].

[1] [https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/07/glacier-national- park...](https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/06/07/glacier-national-park-quietly- removes-its-gone-by-2020-signs/)

<comment><USER15> The 70s and 80s were great times for failed predictions. There's unfortunately never any accountability with this type of thing, and instead we have a slow erosion of trust and general apathy.

[https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco- pocalyp...](https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-failed-eco-pocalyptic- predictions)

<comment><USER16> Taking the most extreme predictions and then pulling them from headlines that misrepresent them, then cherry picking from that is a fairly poor way to organize an argument.

<comment><USER17> I agree, what models and predictions have come true that have been presented in the headlines?

To start with accurate predictions as a base, then present the models and predictions that failed would put things into perspective.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of this: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet- bulb_temperature](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature)

</comment><comment><USER19> We'll see. I remember when Al Gore said we had 10 years in 2006.

<comment><USER20> Climate denialists love to cite the various "We have X years left" claims that are more than X years old, but rarely note that the goal posts have shifted from "almost no warming" to "catastrophic but survivable" warming in the meantime.

If we had started in earnest to reduce emissions in the early nineties when the science was crystal clear, we could be mostly done by now. The current climate is measurably different from thirty years ago, but obviously not so bad. Unfortunately we barely did anything in the last thirty years, so we can only hope to finish decarbonization in another thirty years. By then we'll have locked in another two degrees of warming and, if we're unlucky, hit some trigger points that cause runaway warming (e.g. Greenland losing most of its ice, large parts of the permafrost thawing...) which we're powerless to stop.

<comment><USER21> How is 0.1-0.2 degrees warmer "measurably different"? (I'm curious - I haven't been reading much of the literature lately, and this is new to me).

<comment><USER9> Firstly, where did you get 0.1-0.2 degrees (did you mean C or F?) from? We are currently 0.98C above 1951-1980 averages [0], and presumably a bit more above pre-industrial times.

Secondly, as for measurably different: there are a million articles on the internet detailing how weather patterns have changed across the world in the last few decades.

For some personal perspective: I live in Zurich, where winter temperatures once hovered around freezing and there were 20 days of snow per year [1]. Winter gets milder and milder and this year it almost didn't happen. Autumn just became spring at some point. It snowed for 10 minutes. I look around at all the buildings here with snow protection fences on their roofs and wonder when people will remove them through lack of use. Nearby ski resorts were brown and grassy, not white. And as winters have gotten warmer, so have summers. There was a huge number of days over 30 last year -- something that used to be quite extreme.

Also, although global temperatures have "only" risen ~1C this increase is not uniformly distributed. In particular the Arctic is heating much faster, accelerating melting ice caps and sea level rise [2].

[0] [https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global- temperature/](https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/) [1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich#Climate) [2] [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/climate/climate-change- ar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/10/climate/climate-change-arctic- warming.html)

I encourage you to read up on what's going on, get scared, and vow to do something (vote, lobby, educate, etc).

(Edit: added NASA source)

<comment><USER22> Meanwhile today in Hamburg it went down from 4 to 3°C between 00:50AM and 01:11AM at some point, and later, 1,5km away on the outskirts next/near to open fields it went down to 2 to 1° at 04:50AM. That felt rather cold for early May. (I've been walking to the gas station, and ventilating my rooms at these times. BRRR!)

As i understand it, it all depends on the shape of the polar vortex pattern which in turn shapes/modulates the jet stream.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Then live underground?

<comment><USER24> Alternatively; an enormous roof, Buckminster-fuller style.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> In 50 years:

\- Groundwater will be gone.

\- Fish will be gone.

\- Arctic methane will be a problem.

\- Topsoil will die.

<comment><USER26> Can you provide the sources for these claims?

Please consider this a friendly suggestion to help improve the persuasiveness of your comment.

The above claims are non-obvious, to say the least. Many appear to be exaggerations.

Here on HN, it is my experience that people seek out useful discussion. It may be based on personal experiences and/or credible sources. If you have sources, share them.

<comment><USER25> Source: wait 50 years.

The evidence is overwhelming, worldwide. Pick any source you want at this point.

<comment><USER26> I invite you to reflect on what you wrote. Please offer a substantive response.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The best thing you can do to help is get your family to vote Democrat. They're the only viable party who acknowledges the problem.

<comment><USER28> The Republican party used to acknowledge the problem, just differing from Democrats in how to address it. There are still such Republicans, including some who were quite prominent a few years ago, e.g., [1].

If you live in a state where a Republican is quite a bit more likely than a Democrat to win the general election, it would probably be more effective to register as a Republican so you can participate in the primaries or caucuses that select the Republican candidate for the general election.

There you can support candidates more like Republicans of a few years ago who would acknowledge and address the problem.

[1] [https://www.clcouncil.org/media/2017/03/The-Conservative- Cas...](https://www.clcouncil.org/media/2017/03/The-Conservative-Case-for- Carbon-Dividends.pdf)</comment></comment>


Apple Celebrates "Dickinson," Coming to Apple TV+ November 1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/10/apple-celebrates-dickinson-coming-to-apple-tv-plus-november-1/ <comment><USER2> Heard there would be censorship from day one.

Netflix has it right so far. Watch one about Australia 5 eye tv show. Good balance. Not need to take side. Just no taboo.</comment>


12-minute Mandelbrot: fractals on a 50 year old IBM 1401 mainframe - <AUTHOR> http://www.righto.com/2015/03/12-minute-mandelbrot-fractals-on-50.html <comment><USER3> I worked as a paid programmer on card systems in 1970. I'm not saying things were better then. Give me C++ and Python any day over Assembler.

However, there was something magical about being able to step through your program one instruction at a time using a switch on the control panel, or being able to display and modify the memory with lights & toggle switches. It was like you were reaching right into the soul of the machine, in a mysterious world.

Compilations were so expensive (40 min. for a 4,000-card program) that we would often patch the binary card decks to squeeze one more test.

We had to segment our programs into "overlays" that would load consecutively, and re-use the same limited memory locations. What a pain :o)

Having dealt with index registers in Assembler, C pointers were a cinch.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of: [http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf](http://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/fisk.pdf)

<comment><USER5> I enjoyed that story; my father could have written it, although at a large railroad as the setting. As per the very end of the story, lets just say it was into the 00s before we ran out of what seemed to be an infinite supply of bookmarks and art project stock paper.

I distinctly remember as a kid watching the first star trek movie on TV on a VCR tape and making a shoebox sized model "Enterprise" out of many used punch cards and about a roll of scotch tape, although that was hardly the only art project or whatever using punch cards.

I would say by the 90s the very concept of a punch card had pretty much disappeared from the general public conscious and general public people were mystified what my bookmarks were, what is that peculiar artifact I'm using as a bookmark?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Way back in 1985, a seminal 'Computer Recreations' column in Scientific American featured the Mandelbrot set: [https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/De...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/media/inline/blog/File/Dewdney_Mandelbrot.pdf)

(A K Dewdney's columns were always fantastic - a whole new world of wonder for early 'home computer' users!)

After careful study, my brother coded it in assembly on a C64. We both had the idea to double the display resolution (from 320x200 to 640x400) by 'extending' the screen into RAM. After leaving the computer running overnight (often longer), we eagerly came the next day to check progress, and dump the output to a dot matrix printer. We couldn't use color or even grayscale, so black and white stripes were the only option to reveal the glories of the Mandelbrot set.

Result: stunning, finely detailed, black and white images! I still have the printouts...

<comment><USER7> I loved AK Dewdney's columns. The Core War [1] columns influenced me profoundly.

Would love to see the mandelbrot printout scans :)

[1] [http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/](http://www.koth.org/info/akdewdney/)

<comment><USER6> OK, just off the scanner: [http://imgur.com/gallery/8z7zP](http://imgur.com/gallery/8z7zP)

Generated with a Commodore 64, output on an Epson RX80 dot matrix printer, circa 1986. All coding credit to my genius brother!

<comment><USER8> Absolutely marvelous.

Do you and your genius brother still write code?

<comment><USER9> Thanks for posting this fractallyte! We're separated by an ocean, so I'm glad I can see this digitised.

To answer you dang (first, I don't consider myself that), I work as a consultant currently writing C#/.NET code for a large corporation. But hopefully one of my side projects (using various other technology stacks) will pan out one day, and I'll be able to escape, like many of us here dream about (and many have already achieved) :)

<comment><USER8> I hope you do and also that you continue to participate on Hacker News. Between kens outdoing himself with the wonderful OP, and all the other historical contributions here, this has my vote for the best HN thread in quite a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The footnotes in this article are fantastic.

I used the inflation calculator [1] to convert 1960s prices to today's dollars:

\- Rental price: ~$20,000 / month

\- Purchase price: ~$1,000,000 (yes, a million dollars).

So what you're looking at is what used to be a million dollar computer. You could buy a car for every month you pay to use this machine, so you better had really useful programming ideas or it's back to pen & paper :)

As the author points out, this was considered the model T of computers because of how affordable it was compared to what sold before.

The attention to detail is tremendous.

I never paid much attention to the design of old IBM mainframes, but now I can see how profoundly it influenced our perception of computing. I love the author's phrase "inherent drama of computing." and how it became a trope. The IBM industrial design book [2] he recommends is now going on my to-read list..

[1] [http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/](http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/)

[2] The Interface: IBM and the Transformation of Corporate Design [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816670390/ref=as_li_tl?ie=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0816670390/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0816670390&linkCode=as2&tag=rightocom&linkId=UK7DS5UBJVT5HIAG)

<comment><USER10> I'm glad someone reads my footnotes :-). About the rentals - most customers rented instead of buying. This had a huge effect on computer companies. Starting a competitor was extremely capital intensive since you had to build the computers up front and then you got revenue monthly, rather than from big sales. Rentals also made IBM conservative since they didn't want to introduce a new machine that would obsolete all the old ones they were still renting out.

As for the design book, I only recommend it about 50% - it has a lot of academic theory that HN readers may find uninteresting. It also goes into great detail of the architecture of IBM buildings. Not to discourage you but just set expectations.

<comment><USER11> Just curious, what's the MTBF of those two machines at the museum? Hard to believe those those germanium transistors aren't all leaky as heck by now.

<comment><USER10> There's always something to repair - the 1401 restoration team (consisting of retired IBM engineers) is at the museum every Monday doing maintenance. The computers work most of the time, but the card readers take a lot of adjustment and they are still trying to get all the tape drives operational.

One nice thing about the 1401 is the gates swing open for easy access to the circuitry for hardware debugging. This picture from Wikipedia shows what debugging looks like, with an oscilloscope hooked up to the 1401: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401#/media/File:IBM_1401_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401#/media/File:IBM_1401_signal_tracing_at_CHM.agr.jpg)

The museum has a cabinet full of SMS cards, so if they find a problem, in most cases they can swap out the bad card. The card can then be fixed, usually by replacing the bad transistor.

At the start, fixing all the bad transistors was a huge problem, which is why it took the restoration team 10 years to get the 1401 running. The German machine in particular was a problem because it had been stored in an unheated garage for a decade, so there was a lot of corrosion. Some of the transistors would literally fall apart if you touched them. (This is what I'm told - <USER2> wasn't part of the restoration.) The other complication with the German machine is it included the "overlap" feature, which allowed overlapping of reading, punching, and computation for increased performance. A nice feature, but it made it much, much harder to figure out what was wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is fascinating. While I have a soft spot for old computers, I don't think I would put that much time into such a project. I do admire the author's determination, though! I imagine it must have been a lot of fun and thoroughly enjoyed reading about it.

Just the other day, I was talking to one of our automation engineers on the phone, and while waiting for his computer to reboot, we talked about old hardware. He told me how, as a student, he sometimes had to write programs in FORTRAN, and how punched cards were kind of, eh, expensive[1], so the students were all kind of happy when somebody hooked up a paper tape reader to the university computer. Until, that is, they realized that paper tape - at least the paper they were using - was kind of prone to tear, and sometimes students would get their programs back in pieces.

I feel nostalgic about this era I did not see for myself, but I also appreciate today's computers being cheap and - for most intents and purposes - mind-bogglingly fast.

EDIT: Also, it is fascinating how the 1401 was simple enough that one could get to know each part of it so intimately, from the software running down to the individual pieces making up the processor. On today's computers, where even the keyboard controller is probably more complex than the entire 1401, this has become pretty much impossible.

[1] This engineer is from Eastern Germany, and I know that, for example, audio tape was fairly expensive over there. But punched cards, made out of paper? And keep in mind, this must have been at least around 1980!

<comment><USER13> Paper tape was also oily, so it lubricated the punch as it moved through it. It had a certain tendency to spontaneous combustion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This article and its footnotes constitute the best summary of an IBM mainframe computing environment I have ever encountered. Have occasionally tried to read the old reference materials but they were never remotely this cogent. He also makes good use of modern context, since we have now settled on fundamentals such as word length, binary encoding, and so on. A masterpiece in miniature.

</comment><comment><USER15> Very nicely done article.

However, I think the 029 keypunch didn't overlap the lifetime of the 1401, but I could be wrong.

The other marvel of the day was the 1403 printer, which had a lifetime that went long beyond the 1401. It was a bit noisy, and the cover you see in the photos there did serve as a pretty good damper.

However, when I did a co-op at IBM in Portland Oregon during my engineering studies, they had a 1403 printer hooked to a 360/30 printing library catalog cards. There was a roll of card stock feed by an automatic feeder that set perhaps 5 feet from the printer. It would feed more stock from the three-foot diameter roll when the printer pulled the paper out. The length of card stock between the printer and the feeder served as a very effective sound amplifying board causing quite a racket.

<comment><USER10> Obviously the 029 keypunch overlaps the lifetime of the 1401 since they are both still working :-)

But seriously, the 029 was introduced in 1964 along with the IBM 360 mainframe, while the 1401 wasn't withdrawn until 1971, and some were used long after that, so they had plenty of overlap.

You're right that the 1403 printer is pretty cool. One interesting thing is it has a hydraulic pump running the paper feed, so it can skip lines very rapidly.

<comment><USER16> And the disk drives on that 360 had hydraulic actuators to move the heads. Was that the 2301 or 2311 disk, or something else? Where I was in IBM Poughkeepsie we kept our programs on removable disks of somewhere around 16 in. in diameter. I don't remember the capacity but it was in MB. At the end of the line of disk drives sat our 029 card punch. I spent way too many hours at that punch because my fingers were so inept. There was no backspace 'cause you can't unpunch holes.

We used a card based program to modify the code that accumulated on our personal disk as ISAM data sets. I set that up for my department after dropping and bursting open a very long portable card carrier (of mostly unsequenced cards) that was used before my 1967 "innovation." :-)

What shocks me at the moment is the incredibly clear 50 year old mental map and images I have of that machine room and the computers in it. A 360 model 50 that I primarily used. Beside that a model 40, down the isle a model 67, behind that a 7094 and further on a big ol' model 85. Across the hall a honking model 91. No 1401's in that room, however, but lots of 1403 printers.</comment></comment></comment>


Man arrested for trying to detonate what he thought was a car bomb in Oklahoma - <AUTHOR> https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdok/pr/man-arrested-trying-detonate-what-he-thought-was-vehicle-bomb-downtown-oklahoma-city <comment><AUTHOR> The FBI seems to have gone further than usual (in my limited understanding of what is usual) here with "assisting" the man to incriminate himself. To me (not a lawyer) it sounds a little like entrapment.

      ... an undercover FBI agent posed as a person who could assist him.
      According to the complaint, Varnell took a series of actions to
      advance his plot. He identified BancFirst as the target, prepared a
      statement to be posted on social media after the explosion, helped
      assemble the device, helped load it into what he believed was a
      stolen van, drove the van by himself from El Reno to BancFirst in
      downtown Oklahoma City, and dialed a number on a cellular telephone
      that he believed would trigger the explosion.

      Varnell is charged with attempting to use explosives to destroy a
      building in interstate commerce.</comment>


Show HN: A beautiful and simple todo list app built with ReactJS - <AUTHOR> http://135list.com

<comment> johnny-rockets Hey, one of the 135 devs here, let us know if you have questions or feedback, we'd love to know what HN thinks.</comment>


Ask HN: What sort of things do resume filters look for? - <AUTHOR> Been curious about what kinds of methods resume filters use to make decisions. Anyone have knowledge/experience designing a filter and can spill the beans? <comment><USER2> If you are trying to get your resume through the filter:

1\. Keywords and keyword density are most of it (for humans or machines). Neither are not good at synonyms -- use the keywords you see in the job- description.

2\. Write a very specific cover-letter that matches your qualifications to the job description explicitly. If you cannot write this letter (because you are not a good match), apply to a different job (keywords matter here too).

3\. Get someone to proofread for readability and correctness -- a lot of people screen out for stupid mistakes.</comment>


Ask HN: What other SASS for developers (like Zencoder and Twilio) are out there? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to think of new projects to start on and I think some of the best possible ideas are taking the existing professional APIs that I can pay for, like Zencoder and Twilio, and use them to make something really cool and useful for small businesses, online and in my local area.
So, with that said, I know that there are other startups like this out there, providing really great tools and infrastructure that I can use for my own.
Are there any, even your own, out there that you can recommend? <comment><USER2> SendGrid, Postmark, SimpleGeo, a bevy of payments APIs, SoundCloud, InfoChimps, Factual

</comment><comment><USER3> s/SASS/SAAS</comment>